A friend is someone who cares for you, who looks after you in time of need, who supports you in your endeavours. I’m sure a lot of you have friends, but friends who matter count for only a few. I had lots of friends when I was employed a couple of years ago, but friends who really cared and looked out for me were probably very very few or none at all.

I’d stick out my neck for them. Spoke up for what I believed in, and eventually, lost my job despite building literally the entire web-based infrastructure by myself.

No one wants to lose their jobs. In the office, you share gossip with your workmates, and in a medium sized company, especially one with “foreign talent”, they split into cliques.

I was a senior developer in the team, I had qualifications. I had expert knowledge. I had valuable experience and insight. I imbued a sharing culture in my team, although it seems, the only one willing to share was me. I tried to create a desire to learn and contribute in my team, but it seems such a culture cannot be created in many Singaporean companies.

Why?

Simply because, everyone’s interested only in themselves. They’d protect their backsides, prevent work from being dumped on their desk, and speak nicely to the boss and give this plastic smile.

If anything, I’ve been known to dish out criticism when I see it fit. I don’t care who you are. You can be some director, or a high ranking officer. But when I think something requires redress, I will say it. I try to be polite yet honest. But sometimes, people tend to mistake that brutal honesty to bring you down.

Here’s an advice. If I’m honest, I care. Because friends don’t tell you what you want them to. They’ll tell you to wake up your freaking idea!

I’ve learnt a lot about myself, and in all my trials and tribulations, it seems that I realised I am mostly unselfish. I’d put my neck out on the line way too often than I really should. I remember fondly of my teenage years in the mosque, when I was secretary-general of the youth. I was often in loggerheads with the then-chairman of the mosque, who also happened to be a very high ranking staff in MediaCorp and the chairman of the Malay Journalists Association.

After a heated debate for which I realised no one in the LPM had balls to speak up against, I tendered my resignation as the secretary-general. the youth wing which often hit the headlines and the internet, sufferred dearly and could never pick up itself again.

Thankfully, there are friends who care about you, who’ll stick with you through thick and thin.

You see, business works the same way. The old saying, “It’s not personal, it’s just business”, would be wrong. Business is always personal.

I don’t do business with just anyone. I do business with people I tacitly trust at the very least.

Unfortunately in business, there’s hardly a way to regain trust if you made a mistake. As I said, business is always personal. And grudges often remain for a long time.

That’s how businesses survive. They’re menacing and tenacious, and they’re not afraid to bite you. Because if you give an inch, they’ll ask for a yard.

If you really want to succeed in business, treat business like you treat your friends. Go the extra mile, because your partner or your customer is your friend. They will appreciate it, and will return you the favour.

In the office, if you’re an employee, and you go the extra mile, your boss will appreciate you. But if you’re the sort that will give criticisms like me, get out of a job, and be your own boss. Honestly, I find that people who are generally comfortable have nothing to say. They’ll have complaints, but their way out more often than not is to find another job.

But if you’re fiercely independent, and speak your mind, you’re a leader. A job is not your cup of tea.

Friends also should know that you don’t date your exs. In business, it means that if you know someone who started a business, and you know him well enough to call him a friend, don’t compete with him. Don’t start a business and then literally copycat his every move.

It was very frustrating to see whom I thought was a friend enter into reseller agreements with nearly all the people I myself worked with. True, they say that copying is a kind of flattery, but in business, copying means you’re asking for a fight.

You just don’t do that. If you must enter into a business that’s of a similar domain as a friend of yours, one should cooperate. Not compete!

Unfortunately, businesses that don’t make it, are businesses that are selfish. And friends, they’re not selfish.

One might argue that the market is there for the taking. It’s fair game. But when you’re a small startup, the last thing you need is competition brewed by someone you know.

I failed in business once. I made a lot of mistakes. I had the wrong team dynamics. I trusted a cheat. I lost some money. I never took more action. I probably also entered into business at the wrong time. Perhaps, then, I should have started out getting a job.

6 months after I closed down, I started up again, with a much clearer vengeance. I didn’t try to wow. I just focused on one thing and one thing only.

In the past 2 years of running Verbeter Group, it is today the biggest avast Antivirus distributor in (yes, I dare say) all of Southeast Asia and South Asia.

I have my own network of resellers, at least 10 of them, and the biggest of the lot is NCS Pte Ltd. Imagine a small business owner like me, having a GLC as a partner.

My reputation has grown so much, I don’t need to find new products, companies who want to push their products, come to me.

My clients are not only in Singapore. They are in India, and the Maldives and also Malaysia. In Malaysia, a client that uses my products is the biggest cinema chain and film distributor in Malaysia, Golden Screen Cinemas.

In the Maldives, I have the Government of Maldives as my client.

In India, I have Web Synergies Indian branch office.

How did I do this? By building friendships. Not customers.

In the next week and onwards, my schedule is going to be filled with meetings with top management from some of the biggest companies in the world in the IT security business. Buoyed by my successes in 2008, Verbeter Group will expand and diversify.

Does this mean I will employ anyone anytime soon? Yes. But probably none in Singapore. I’ll be setting up base overseas, with a small team in India and the Phillippines. I will also be looking at greater expansion into Malaysia and India.

Will my reseller base grow? Exponentially. My resellers will grow 2-fold next year.

What are the kind of things Verbeter Group will be doing in 2009? Basically, we’re looking at how to improve internet experiences. We’re talking to a few partners (ie. some of the biggest IT security companies in the world), and we feel that we offer a very unique 3-step solution to improving internet experiences in business and leisure.

These are the kind of things I am able to do when you treat your business like you treat your friends. Success will come to you. I’ve only been in business for 2 years. I haven’t reached my first 100,000 yet. But next year, I can just feel it. The momentum is growing very fast. I don’t even want to talk about a million. I think setting such a goal is wishy washy. For me, I set it much lower. I think when you do that, things become so much easier to attain.

Marc looks like a simple, humble guy, who speaks like any Chinese Singaporean I know. I didn’t realise he owns a business until I had his namecard.

What impresses me, behind that guarded facade was the kind of business he runs, and the ability for him to survive all this while. He has a proper office at Stanley Road. In fact, I think I pass by that road often when I used to be working in town. A team of a 11 he says he has. Mostly with a team of programmers in China.

I asked him about how he has managed to keep it together for so long. And it’s the same story I’ve heard or rather experienced. Manage your overheads. Don’t live beyond your means.

My dad used to run an engineering company. Before he was a businessman, he was a General Manager (that means boss), at this large Engineering firm in Bugis. He then left the company to start his own firm. The office was sprawling large. It was besar I tell you. But overheads, overheads, overheads killed it. We didn’t need such a big office. If he had cut the overheads in half, he would have continued until this day, he always said. And then… the Asian Financial Crisis.

Dad could never really pick up from where he left off. The business had to go. And in those days, things got so bad, he, a Masters holder, at sub-40 years of age, had to drive a cab to make ends meet.

Marc experienced the same kind of failure in his first year of business. Overheads killed him. But being young, single and unmarried, he has the advantage of trying again. He charges a hefty premium for his services, the smallest of his consultancy plans comes at $3,000, the largest at $8,000. But it’s all about killing the killer. Overheads.

I’ve seen the same thing in the place I’m currently working at. Overheads is always an issue, and it’s really about your pricing and managing those overheads. We’ve got to price our services more than our costs. And our costs, also includes our salary.

I’ve often felt that profits would be my salary. But the secret to Marc’s success I think was that he included salary as his overheads. Which is why his services are a premium. In that way, he gets to live a daily living without worrying when the next pay cheque will come. You’re not digging into your profits that way.

How do you define success? Well, Marc disclosed to me that next year’s NDP website, might go to him. That’s success. You know if the government is going to trust you with something like that, you know you’ve made it.

I learnt that they had employed 15 sales staff, and none of them are producing results. I chuckled learning about such terrible management decisions. If they were actually large enough, 15 sales reps would have been an appropriate headcount. But employing so many staff, without fixing the holes in their sinking ship, is just too much weight to carry, exercabating their decline.

They had never worked on creating their own product line and getting that right from the beginning. When I first joined them, there weren’t a lot of clients who got our web development services. They didn’t even have a content management solution. Because quite simply, their staff come and go.

I was probably the longest serving Systems Development staff after my manager in that time, and they decided to let me go. Just because I frequently clashed with the incredibly young HR manager (barely legal 21), with no degree nor human resource experience. I had an education, and I have experience. But my pay, and my benefits was peanuts. If you don’t treat your employees well, and I mean monetarily well. Then quite simply, they will leave.

Money isn’t everything. But everything is money. I agree with Adam Khoo there. But why am I, a Diploma holder, and who was pursuing a top University degree, getting less than someone who is 5 years my junior, and with no experience in her field nor does she have the qualifications in that line?

Yes, the boss was playing favourites. She was his girlfriend. And while I tried my best to respect her “senior” position, I just could not respect her as a person, just because she sucked the right dick (Please pardon my French).

I produced quality work. Perhaps some people don’t like my laid back style. But I produced enough to win me a damn Top Employee Award. And I wanted to prove that it wasn’t a fluke. So the following month, I worked extra hard and stayed back daily to achieve my targets.

Guess what. I lost it to my colleague who produced much less than I did. And then I realised that the carrot program, instituted by my untrained HR, was just a game of musical chairs. Later into the year, it became a predictable game of “Who hasn’t got it yet will win it”.

And so, quite simply, I decided not to work so hard for obvious reasons.

If you can’t reward your employees fairly, then quite simply, they will leave. Singaporeans don’t take favours. We earn rewards, not gift them.

They had 2 potential source of revenues, but it was never fully utilised. I failed to understand why they did not attempt to create content or security solutions. There was enough Undergraduate knowledge in the company that could produce tons of ideas. But nothing was ever produced.

Instead, the company continually focussed on Outsourcing and Staffing. It seemed that while we had branded themselves as an end-to-end solutions company, it became more and more of an IT job search firm.

The company needed to take a step in the right direction. We needed to create small, nifty tools that did just one thing, and that one thing right. We needed to innovate. But no one listened to me. Instead, they despised me. I was not the only person to be given the boot. A week later, a colleague of mine was sacked immediately. No notice was given. Like me, she stayed back often to achieve her goals. So how could someone, who had won the Best Employee Award, just the month before, get sacked so quickly? It just didn’t make sense.

If they only realised the amount of ideas and knowledge that I had, they wouldn’t have let me go. But then again, as long as that little girl, in that little short skirt, holds the rank of HR, I certainly do not want to work there.

I can even dare say that even though the company I’m working at now is small, even though we don’t have any sales staff, we sure make more than they do. Why? Quite simply, we spend minimally. And we continuously innovate. At least here, we have our own products. We don’t stop innovating. Once we’re done prototyping, we improve. And we keep doing it until innovation saturates, and we start over with a new product and repeat that same pathway to success.

But while his books have been about business and financial literacy, I’ve been writing more about civic issues, technology and the occasional business pieces. I find that I’m talented in writing civic issues, which prompted me to wonder if I should be a journalist and work for BBC. The BBC website is my primary source of news and perhaps that’s why I’m inclined to think that BBC has the best journalistic standards. I’d rather not work for MediaCorp or SPH. My rebel-like personality does not suit well with the pro-PAP stance of its papers and journalists having huge egos don’t like to see their masterpieces rejected.

On second thought, a huge part of me is a risk taker, and I’d rather be running a business than working for someone. So here I am, running my own nearly-daily online zine. After reading some of Adam’s book, it inspired me to press on with this experiment of mine. Note that this is an experiment, and I am prepared for failure. If I fail, I’d just continue experimenting, until Eureka!, I find a solution.

While I may not totally agree with some of his opinions, I do agree with most of his assumptions, ideas and points of what makes a person a potential millionaire. I find that Adam is obsessed with wealth-making, short of being meglomaniac. Perhaps he does present a strong bout of narcissism, especially since he names a business after himself. It does suggest he likes to be revered, and he does make outrageous boasts about how his business outperforms or supercedes his competitors. But since he has earned his way up, who’s to say he doesn’t deserve that authority to make such claims?

At 26, what I have in my bank account is peanuts compared to his nett worth. So, I shall not suggest that I know more about business than he does. But I do have my own ideas about what makes a person successful in business and I’ll draw parallels and perpendiculars against 5 of his ideas.

Passion

Passion is one thing that a lot of so-called businesspersons think they have, but in truth, they lack it. Passion is the difference between people like Steve Jobs (CEO, Apple Inc), and someone like you. Adam nailed it on the spot when he described what kind of business is a good business to go into when he was asked by some of his course participants, and I completely agree.

In this age of enlightened fiscal awareness, I observed that a lot of Singaporeans are struggling to get out of the rat race by moonlighting in programmes called Multi-Level Marketing. When the name of their business received flak, they renamed it to Network Marketing. In my opinion, you can call it by any other name, marketing is still marketing. No difference.

If you ask anyone in the MLM world, you realise that they have little or no passion for the product. They’re not fascinated by it, and they don’t know the inner workings of the product, and in all likeliness, they didn’t invent it. Most times if not all, you will find that people who peddle these products are only in it for the passion of making money, motivated by the dream of living comfortably, far far away from the rat race.

If you have passion for your business, you’d have the main ingredient to become successful in it. Without it, your business will die a natural death, joining those other 90% of businesses who fail to make it in their first year of business. Mostly those who lack that drive.

So before you start a business, you must have an interest in what you do, and you must have more than merely liking it. You must be passionate about it!

Passion to the point of obsession

Adam describes that he would work 19-hour days, everyday, and only rest on Chinese New Year, and even that for 1 day, and he seems to suggest that you must do such things to be successful like him. I believe that passion for something is good. But like all things, one must be balanced.

I believe that being successful doesn’t mean you should sacrifice your social life, but you should forego some of the more pointless or less productive ones. For example, these are some of the activities you can do without or have less of:

• Bumming around (In Malay, we call it Lepak)
• Partying
• Gaming
• Anything that you do that does not help you make money and the list goes on…

Less or none of these activities should push you away from your inertia of non-enrichment. I notice that those who tend to fail, are those that do not put their time into good use. In Adam’s case, he makes use of most of his time making more money. Not a bad activity I must add, and obviously, he enjoys it. People who tend to go clubbing a lot or people who skive from school are often those who do poorly academically. Unfortunately, they may also be people who have untapped intellect and if they had spent their time doing more productive things, they could be very successful today.

Dedication

What I think Adam can do better to illustrate his idea of passion is to make use of this word called “dedication”. Adam is a dedicated educator. He likes making money, running businesses and sharing with people his knowledge on how to be financially independent. He is genuinely sincere about helping you reach your potential as can be seen by his extremely thorough programmes, from academic success to financial freedom.

Dedication is what separates Adam and his business competitors. He dedicates his waking hour to help you with your success. Where others only give you a 1 hour preview, Adam gives you a free 1 day course. Where others catch up with you on an adhoc basis, Adam provides free dedicated access to his guides via email for a minimum of 3 solid months.

Dedication is what makes people like Fandi Ahmad the best footballer Singapore has ever produced. A lot of younger Singaporeans, particularly those born from 1987 and after may not remember his heroics. I am a big fan of Fandi. I was one of those crazy people that bought his biography. I read how he would spend an hour extra a day to perfect his skills. That’s dedication, and that’s why he was successful in Europe. Fandi became Singapore’s first sport millionaire and today, he is also in the Dutch team, Groningen FC’s hall of fame.

You don’t need to spend 19 hour days like Adam. But if you spend an extra hour everyday to hone your skills, then you’d only get better.

You don’t need $100,000 capital

You already have a million dollar capital and you don’t even realise that it’s there. Your brain, says Adam. Your brain is the gift that God gave you that helps you create ideas. And ideas are priceless. You certainly don’t need capital. Ideas are all you need. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak didn’t have $100,000 capital when they started an idea to make pre-fabricated boards for personal computers. Their first office was a garage at Job’s home! And they paid their friends $1 for each board assembled for a $20 profit. Today, Apple Inc is a multi-million/billion dollar business with high profits selling the best computers on Earth, the Apple Macintosh.

Inaction will not realise an idea

I must admit that I am a procastinator. I tend to wait till the cows come home and rush for the last mile. If I’m lucky, I’d only just make it, and if I had achieved better, that must have been a fluke. But if I was consistent, I tend to not just achieve, I over-achieve.

I’ve written countless of business plans, from cafes with a niche online audience, to amateur soccer competitions with an online social network, to a music social network with an internet version of Idol. A lot of these ideas eventually became reality, but by other people. I had procrastinated and I paid the price of non-enrichment.

Adam was right that ideas are priceless. They may be worth a million dollars, but without action, they may be worth nothing.

A failure adverse culture stunts success

Adam was talking about the traits of Millionaires being able to turn failure into success. He cites how Donald Trump had lost $935 million but somehow turned it into a $3.7 billion fortune. I do not agree with Adam that most people with that much wealth would call it quits. However, most people who don’t have that much wealth and hears about such failures would call it quits even if they had lost $5,000 in the first 6 months.

In Singapore, failure is not an option. Maybe it’s the educational system. You can’t be a failure to go to college, and if you are a failure, your place is in ITE. For some cases, the non-achieving student may be just plain lazy and thus did not even make an attempt to achieve something in life, which of course thoroughly deserve a place there. But there are others who break out from this stereotype. I’ve seen ITE students who are hardworking and willing to work to be somebody. These people usually do not end up with college degrees, but they will end up with a more colourful life, while a few have gone on to Polytechnics and even University. These are what I like to call the late bloomers and for me, they have achieved more than those who get straight As every year.

I think however, the system is influenced by the people’s culture. Our Asian culture has this paranoia of losing face. People who fail are not well received by the community and the thought of being embarrassed in front of your other friends and relatives is simply just unacceptable. This failure adverse culture transcends into business. Venture Capitalists firms here are very conservative in my opinion and they have no intention of risking thousands for a new brilliant idea unless that idea can be proven to succeed.

This stunts creativity and in turn success. It has been proven time and time again that the creative triumphs even the grey money-making monster. Apple created the first personal computers with a mouse and GUI. At the time, there was no such innovation, and Apple made a huge breakthrough in personal computing. They made computers accessible to normal people. Microsoft in partnership with IBM and later with other computer makers made PCs even easier with a simpler OS and made it the giant it is today. But this large behemoth is way behind in innovation, and Apple has time and time again showed that even though they are smaller, they can become the market leader in personal computing. They created the first personal computer in Apple I, the first PDA in Apple Newton, and they revolutionised portable music, completely making Sony Walkmans and MDs irrelevant with their iPod. Today, Apple has reinvented the phone and is poised to gain a leadership position in the smartphone domain. Whereas Microsoft’s pathway to dominance is by bullying the smaller companies to extinction. Their anti-competitive actions caused companies like Netscape and Real Networks to utter footnotes in the IT world.

But with an open playing field like the Internet, Microsoft has found itself lagging, grabbing only 4% of Internet advertising revenue as opposed to Google’s 77%. Google is so much smaller, but they never stop innovating. PC makers like IBM, HP and Dell find themselves way behind Apple because of their lack of innovation to make better PCs.

In a nutshell, failure cannot be feared to achieve success.

Altogether now

So let me sum it up for you in a single sentence. Success in business requires a person to be passionate and dedicated at what he does, coupled with consistent action and an enterprising idea and a willingness to be fearless of failure.

And that is wealth by Adam Khoo and me.

Think Big, Start Somewhere

I don’t believe in starting a business small. If you’re going to do something, be great at it. Don’t be a run of the mill IT company. Don’t just be a kedai masak. Think BIG! All my business plans were huge undertakings. I do not believe in playing for 2nd place. I won’t be a small business person. No.

What I mean is, not to restrict yourself to just one market. I’ve seen too many people starting an IT company with 2 men, and not really having a product or service that defines them.

This is what you call run of the mill. They’re everywhere.

But when you look at Verbeter Group, you think of security. Can you name me another small IT business person that makes a name for himself like this?

Yes, I started out reselling someone else’s products and services, but I built a portfolio around it. This makes my business unique (and we’ll touch on this in another article). I agree that doing big business is too much for one man, so I just started somewhere. Where? Start with just one thing. Do one thing, and do it well.

That has become my mantra. Do just one thing and do it well. But didn’t I say think BIG?! Am I contradicting myself? No. There’s a difference between doing and thinking. I’ve thought big. And by this, I meant my infrastructure. Not my size. I started the business thinking of the future first. Not the present. I laid my operations plan on how to do things quickly, better.

One of the things that I did was to invest in technology. I want to be reachable all over the world, and so I invested in a web hosting business to use its servers as my storefront. I didn’t need to buy servers, I only needed to buy the space and bandwidth. I used it as my integrated business system, running open source CRM systems and keeping track of leads and sales. It is an overkill coz my sales were not high yet, so I chucked it aside and used office productivity software instead. This kept costs extremely low and I didn’t need to take in a lot of time to develop or customise the CRM systems.

But I didn’t just jump on the Windows wagon. A lot of small businesses use Windows because they are familliar with the system. They use MS Office coz that’s the only thing that they’re comfortable in. But I worked on Linux and Macintosh systems instead and my productivity has never been better. I’ve never fallen to a virus, stalling my work. And my systems have never crashed. I use only Apple’s iWorks and I build business documents faster and better than people on Windows.

A lot of people just use any Windows systems, some as old as Windows 98. But shelling out that 1.6k was the best investment I made.

Do just one thing and do it well

I’ve seen businessmen who do just about anything for their customers. My previous employment, an IT company sold t-shirts to their clients. I didn’t get it. Why are we selling something completely unrelated to IT?? I’ve also seen some of my competition doing the same thing. I don’t understand why do they combine so many businesses like printing, to IT to virtual addresses to whatever you can think of all into one business entity?

Look at Verbeter Group. We may be a group, but we do just one thing. How are we doing?

United States Dollars Five Thousand and Seventy Eight and Cents Ninety-Two

This is my Christmas Present. I sold over 20 licenses of server antivirus software to the Maldives Government through one of my bigger resellers, a quasi-government IT consultancy.

I’ve gone past the $10,000 mark in gross revenue, and I didn’t do a lot of marketing. All I needed to do was get in touch with the right people.

Where is Verbeter Group going towards now? We’ll see lah. I’m not about to give away everything what. Hahaha.

Inspired to start a business? Great! Just don’t sell soap.

Anyway, that’s a lot of money right? Yup. And I didn’t need to do MLM like a lot of people. In fact, the profits gained from MLM are so small, you won’t be able to earn this much sideline income if you sold 10,000 units of your own health and beauty supplements.

A lot of people are hit by the entrepreneurism bug. Everyone wants to get rich. Everyone wants to be a millionaire. These are all good dreams.

But I will never believe in MLM. I’ve seen businessmen sway away from their business because of their inefficiency and ineptness coz they think they can earn more through selling soap.

I created this mantra, “Don’t sell soap”, after going to countless Amway seminars and other MLM businesses that have reached our shores. I’ve stopped going to such seminars since 2 and a half years ago.

I’m sure I’ll be raising the hornets nest, knowing a lot of my friends that are involved in this (this is afterall the in your face guide). But if you can show me a US dollar cheque just like mine, with better returns, through selling soap in just 4 months, then I’ll take that back. I’ll even throw in a nice S$100 cheque.

But face it, you don’t earn big bucks by sidelining. You earn it through focus and consistency. You zero in on your goal, on your dreams, and you keep doing whatever it is that seems to work. And God willing, you’ll reach it.

Start it up yourself

Warren Buffet was asked once, if he could start all over again, what would he do? He said, “Ask for help.”

I say, he is half right. I followed his advice once, and I paid for it. Clearly, he didn’t mean ask for anyone’s help! That’s what you got for being so literal. I started out small, on my own, with another partner, Norza. Together, we were darn good. I did the programming, she did the design. We set up a company called Ameleora Solutions (now defunct).

I had a vision for the company. I wanted it to be a premier web development agency. I don’t want it to be run of the mill. I want it to be different. Fresh.

The site was probably the fourth revamp in 2 years. We changed a lot in those years. Nor came out with the first Ameleora website. It was completely in flash, and to be honest, it was the freshest design ever. Perhaps, if I had wanted it to continue purely as a web development agency, I might have not let it develop into a security focussed company. Unfortunately, it’s not easy starting out, and honestly, I didn’t know where to start, and neither did my 3 new partners which I recruited.

I think perhaps, the first mistake for me was to open up Ameleora to other people. I thought, the more people there are, the faster we will grow. One by one, the team disintegrated, and we weren’t multiplying our results even. I didn’t get new referrals from most of my new partners, and when there was, we had to split the monies five ways.

Nor left, coz the money was better elsewhere. And I think if we had stayed just the 2 of us, perhaps Ameleora would still stand today.

Clearly, “asking for help” could mean many different things. It could mean getting a mentor. It could mean getting employees, an it could also mean the difference between life and death, rich or poor.

Thus, don’t just get help unnecessarily. Get help only when you need it. If you’re the programmer, you certainly don’t need another friend who can program. Not unless you’ve reached a level where you need to focus on other aspects of the business.

Otherwise, my official mantra is, strike it alone, if you can handle it.

Study, study, study

I’ve written dozens of business plans. I swear that if I had acted on some of them, I’d be a millionaire today. One of these plans was written at the height of the dotcom bubble. I had wanted to set up a site that rested on a physical business. Most of my plans were in such a manner. I did not believe in a fully internet-based business, at least not at that time. I saw the Internet more as a business tool than as a click and mortar business entity.

For one thing, the Internet was meant to share information. It wasn’t meant to sell items on eBay. There are very few internet-based businesses that could work using retail patterns, and I still stay true to this mantra today. The internet is about information, and if I’m setting up an internet-based business, it has to be information based.

WRONG!

Try different patterns and see what’s best for you. I’ve written plans from creating a football community league business fronted by a proper website, to social networks that relied on a physical brick and mortar eatery. All of these business plans will work. If you have the funds and resources that is. True enough, I stumbled upon businesses that had similar ideas and embarked on it, and they have continued to exist today. However, they did it in a manner which I wouldn’t have done. So it still remains to be seen if they’d ever survive in 2 years time with increased competition.

When writing a plan, study the market well enough to know who your customers are. They must have a void that needs filling. You could begin from a hunch, but you have to work through the sums and at least get the opinions of others to see if they see potential in your startup. Most of the time, they may be nice, but reiterate to them that you want adversarial opinions if possible. Poke holes at it and test if your business idea sinks before it could even begin.

A successful business will rise if its idea has few holes.

No money? No problem!Â

Well, you could apply for grants, and that’s actually recommended. But I believe that if you want to start a business, start it when you’re young. Not when you’re balding, in your 30’s, with wife, kids and an unborn child. If you’ve reach the big 30, and you don’t earn enough to take care of your family, then don’t get into business. Your family comes first.

Why? Running a business takes immense dedication and effort. My entrepreneurism coach told me once that starting a business is like marriage. The moment you lose it, your world crumbles. You cannot do it when you have a family. In my opinion, it’s not right. Unless you have a simple business which you can run on the side, try not to play with fire. Your wife and kids are your number 1 priorty!

So embark on it when you’re either in your teens or in your early twenties. Youth is an advantage. You don’t have any money, so you have nothing to lose.

To Be Continued in Part 2

I started out developing my own CMS system which I modelled after blogspot.com. I wanted to make things revolutionary. (Which for some reason eventually happened). I liked making things small and simple. And which is why I’m attracted to stuff like Ruby On Rails, and Pragmatic Programming. My CMS system, which I called dotmajix, was simply a suite of small applications called blogmajix, forummajix, cartmajix and what not. And you could pick and choose whatever it is you want to form your own custom solution.

Each app is not a distinct module unlike some CMS systems like Mambo or PHP-nuke back in those days. I hated bloated software and I’ll never write an application that’s meant to do other stuff including the kitchen sink.

Then it happened. OVERHEADS! Microsoft technology is a killer, and I wondered then how my previous company ever managed to survive without strong venture capital.

There is no way, a MS-trained person could ever start out on his own unless he had some money to play with. And by some, I mean, at least $100,000.

I had to make radical changes to the way I did stuff. My dotmajix was almost complete. We even had implementations on 2 sites. It was probably the simplest piece of work anybody have ever used and my clients loved it. But costs were increasing and sales, as expected was low. How now?

I turned to open source, and I had to educate myself with the way of the Torvalds. I stopped using Windows ever since the strengthened piracy and copyright laws came into effect. I began using Ubuntu Linux as my primary machine and I started doing PHP, albeit novicely. Why? Coz of this gizmo here, the WordPress Blogging engine. WordPress was what I imagined dotmajix to be. So I stopped reinventing the wheel. I saw no place for another CMS to be created. Every site I created, I used WordPress. It was simple, smart, elegant. And most of all, it gave people like me a huge advantage.

I’m one of the few people who had probably memorised HTML 3.2 before entering polytechnic. And my transition to HTML 4.01 and later the XHTML standards was painless. WordPress was made for XHTML and it gave people like me the ability to write better code, shorter, simpler, faster.

But soon, either through horrible luck or plain fate, I had to get a proper job. I had been trying to work full-time, but my itch for making it kept pulling me back, which allowed me to accept much low paying jobs. It allowed me the freedom necessary to have an eye on my business. But through the lack of business acumen and inexperience, I made a whole lot of horrid mistakes, like choosing the wrong business partner, especially one who stole and was dishonest.

I lost everything else I owned. And it was rather painful. I managed to scrimp whatever I had left after my money went missing. If I still had that few hundred dollars, given a bit more time, I wouldn’t need to be employed today. I knew in my heart, had I persevered and continued for at least another 6 months, I could have hit the jackpot.

When you’re down, it doesn’t mean you’re out. I started back from scratch. And I needed to be responsible. I placed getting a proper job as my primary responsibility. This part of my life reminded me of the film, Knocked Up, when Ben gave up his business for a stable income with a large web design firm.

I gave myself a couple of months before everything went back into motion again. I started a small sideline business, focussed entirely on doing one thing and one thing only. Sell antivirus. I had initially wanted to resell all kinds of antivirus, and I even tried carving out niche solutions. But I had no time. And I decided, I should just stick to selling avast antivirus and that will just be it.

Why? Time. And this thing called Morals and Ethics.

I do not want to

1) lie, cheat and steal like some stereotypical Malay businessmen. It was enough for me seeing how some Malay businessmen get around the system through backstabbing and lying through their teeth.

2) be a half baked Malay businessman. There are too many of this breed. I was tired really of Malay businesses finding no other thing to do but killing their own brethren. There are a lot of Malay owned IT businesses this I can tell you. And not a single one of them is more than 3 men strength and actually have a physical office in a respectable business area. Each one of them have no idea what a saturated market this is, and all of them for some reason target the same old demographics -> Malays! Don’t they see how smaller the pie has gotten?

3) leave something incomplete. For the first time in my life, I completed a full year in business doing nothing but sell antivirus. And now, I’m coming to my 2nd complete year, and business is good, in the black and never better. Will I grow from here? I don’t know. It all depends on some people getting off my back for example. Once, my friend and I confronted a close pal for setting up an IT consultancy. We feared we would be making enemies out of brothers. We didn’t want that.

Soon, I found more copycats. It seemed like everyone I knew started up their own IT based business, and then everyone seemed to sell the exact same stuff I’m selling! CRAP! I was peeved of course. The market just evaporated. Literally.

Life took a sharp turn for me this year. I had to unstuck myself from a rollercoaster relationship, an ever ridiculous workplace, and a university course which I ended up disliking.

All of which, for year 2008, I have 3 resolutions completed before the year has even begun. I’m in a wonderful relationship with a girl that is definitely the one. I’m employed, comfortably, with familliar environments, familliar faces and safety with the first company I started out with as an intern. And I’m preparing for application to a fine institution of higher learning in NUS taking a course I love.

I finally get to appreciate the more important things in life. And I’m definitely happy.

Money isn’t everything. But it does make the world go round. And for me, doing business is just an act of faith. Therefore, one always has to do it in the right spirit and intention.

Thus, it is wrong, that if you know me personally and we’re friends for quite some time, and I trusted you, and you start your own business selling the same stuff I did. That to me is not in the best spirit.

It is wrong, lying and cheating to secure a deal so that one can get the monies for his family to live comfortably. That to me is not in the right spirit.

It is wrong, NOT PAYING and then lie coz you made errors in business which cost you financially. That to me is not the right intention.

It is wrong, doing everything right, having a good business plan, the luck to meet the right people and yet not being ikhlas (sincere) in your dealings. That to me is not in the right spirit.

You see. I’m sure a lot of us are good people. And a lot of us probably want to lead good, comfortable lives. And a lot of us are getting this entrepreneurial bug and starting their own businesses. But the moment you set up shop, your responsibility is not only on yourself, it’s to the entire jemaah. You need to be wise in business and not make foes out of friends. Suddenly, the chain of brotherhood that locks us together is broken. You see the seriousness of this?

Then 2 years later, your business is gone. And all you have left are people who used to call you abang. Milk evaporated.

NEVER do this.

I hate dealing with Malay businesses and I have headaches dealing with them. It’s an irony I chose to employ myself with a malay-owned business, but only because I felt that they are doing their muamaallat in the right spirit with the right intention. I admit that the company I’m employed with does has its flaws, but which company doesn’t? At least the stuff here isn’t horrible or unmanageable like the shit I got from my former workplace in an expat owned firm.

At least, I’m happier. I get to do the stuff I wanna do. Though sometimes I have to do the stuff I don’t really like to do. But at least, when I do the stuff I wanna do, complete it and showcase it, they’re supportive.

Malays should wisen up. Tread this entrepreneurial route carefully. Do it in the right spirit, and in the right intention. And where there is a valid, compelling reason to collaborate, network and share, then don’t pass it up. And if you find that being self-employed isn’t your cup of tea, well, being employed isn’t a terrible thing either. Life goes on. We do need to make a living. If you do make it big, don’t forget the people who helped you along the way. Don’t be stingy, but don’t blow your money off easily either. Fandi Ahmad’s biggest mistake was to undercharge or not charge at all, because he felt bad taking money from friends. He was afterall the only sports millionaire in his time.

Where is he now? Coaching in Indonesia when he could have started a football school in his name. He had tried everything after football. From auto repairs to God knows what, I fail to comprehend why he did not start a Fandi Ahmad Football Academy. He could have gone back to Holland, get the rights to start a feeder squad to Groningen FC and charge a hefty premium for the only soccer academy of its kind in this region. Everyone across Southeast Asia would flock to Singapore just to enter the Academy. And he would still remain the wealthiest, humblest sports millionaire Singapore has ever produced.

I hope future football stars as well as other Malay millionaire sportsmen like Mardan Mamat don’t dabble into unnecessary territory. I hope Mardan starts a Golfing Academy for future pro-golf aspirants. He could even charge personal training fees to businessmen and diplomats. I just hope he does it. It would be a shame if he becomes another falling star.